Graphical Improvment on GeForce 2 GTS?

[davidkay]

I currently have a Riva TNT 2 Ultra, which I plan to install on my new Athlon 1GHz when i get it. However, i am thinking of Getting a Geforce 2 GTS. Will I notice any graphical improvments over my TNT 2 Ultra. Will they be huge improvments or just minor?

The biggest jump in image quality, is when i got a TNT2 after owning a Voodoo2. The 32Bit colour and higher resolution really made it stunning. Especially Quake 3!

 

[HappyFace]

I'm not an expert on GeForce 2 cards, but I do know that the biggest improvement you'll see, will be a frames per second increase in games. As for image quality, I believe the GeForce 2 will beat your TNT2 card by a small margin, as it has extra 3d game enhancements on board.

 

[jpprod]

On GeForce chips, following features are implemented better than in TNTs:
- Mip mapping. Depth precision used to determine mip map level is done per-pixel basis on GeForce, whereas on TNT it was done on per-polygon basis. Practically this means that in some situations TNT showed slightly too blurry mip maps.
- Trilinear/Anisotropic filtering. TNT has anisotropic and trilinear texture filtering modes, but they were approximated by ugly dithering whenever multitexturing was enabled. GeForce can handle Trilinear/Anisotropic filtering also with multitexturing enabled.
- 300MHz to 350MHz RAMDAC. Oughta assure that 2D image quality is better than on TNT assuming other factors - like card PCB construction and component quality - are not changed for the worse.
- DVD acceleration support. Not directly image quality-affected, but since it greatly lessens CPU load, DVD playback on software supporting hardware MC will have *much* steadier framerate.

There are also several new features which do not directly enhance image quality, but can do so if software supports them:
- DOT3 per-pixel lighting and bump mapping
- DXTC/S3TC texture compression support (in form of higher-resolution textures, compressed vs. uncompressed)
- T&L. Lighting in a couple of titles will look better because hardware lighting quality is better than software whenever software lighting is extremely optimized speed-wise. Examples of such titles are MDK2 and SoF. In Quake III and Evolva T&L improves image quality by allowing higher geometry detail to be selected without loss of performance.
- You can play at higher resolution than on any TNT-series card if title allows so.
- FSAA enhances older D3D games, if it happens to work. In my own experience the 4-sample D3D FSAA with gaussian blur (notch 5 from the left) looks *very* good and runs at adequate speed.
- Cube environment mapping of GeForce provides much better-looking faked reflections than standard environment mapping (found on all 3D-cards released within last two years). Of course, this feature also needs software support.

These are facts about differences between TNT and GeForce families of cards. I won't go into recommending into which of the new video cards one should upgrade to or comment on how remarkable and/or meaningful above improvements are, for I don't want this thread to turn into nVidia vs. ATi vs. 3dfx war

[edit: typos aplenty]

 

[HappyFace]

No, that wouldn't be a good thing War = Bad